Mixed rocket launches surprised me. They make dealing with rockets much better. It almost always does something good, and even when it doesn't do the best thing, I don't remember it ever doing something bad. It reduces micromanagement, and is incredibly convenient.
Going along with this, platform to platform transfers are very nice. Much of the lategame was transferring small numbers of items to different places for various upgrades/modules, and a lot of this can be taken care of now by just allowing platforms to pick up from other platforms when they happen to be in the same spot.
Science automation is also really good. These three things alone have cut down a tremendous amount of busywork and are much appreciated. Another thing that seems to have changed (but I haven't tested it) is the logic of when platforms stop receiving deliveries once their departure conditions are met. In the past, platforms could get stuck on a planet if they were requesting more of something and that thing was being produced fast enough to continually send rockets, which occurred most frequently with agricultural science. Platforms seem to not wait as long now - they seem to stop accepting deliveries once their departure condition is met, rather than waiting for everything requested. If this is true, cool. If not, this is a suggestion.
Another big thing for me is flipping inserters/machines to decide which side of the belt they place things, especially combined with now placing items into the input of splitters. Enables new builds, is convenient, love it. One other case I would like to be able to flip is placing onto a curved belt like in this image:
- inserter flip.png (137.69 KiB) Viewed 405 times
That you can't breaks the rule that you can flip while placing into belts going toward or away and it feels awkward.
I appreciate the wording change to "Enable if" in combinators, as well as all the other additions (not just in 2.1), "else" being very convenient. The "time" mode on selector combinators is appreciated for making clocks. I've done it before by feeding ouput into input, but it tended to get complicated and have weird tick problems that were difficult to diagnose. The circuit network feels fully featured and is very useful. One suggestion I have is for the readability of wires. It's very difficult to tell what is connected to what at the moment. My suggestion is to thicken wires when hovering over a connected entity, and highlight connection points, like this:
- wires.png (802.17 KiB) Viewed 405 times
The new graphics are good, with one exception being that the Assembly machine 1 & 3 are too similar in colour. With alt mode on you can't see the top, and with modules it covers up a lot of the side. It's difficult at a glance to identify the difference. It's only something that occurs in the early game, but I definitely noticed.
- assemblers.png (3.71 MiB) Viewed 405 times
I like the planets in the background. I saw on reddit someone made the planets much bigger I think think it looks better. I can't find it to show, but the planets took up most of the screen and it looked like the platform was hovering over it, whereas at the moment it looks like the platforms are thousands of miles away.
I like the animation on rocket silos when it's making parts. I didn't realize how convenient this would be until seeing it in game.
Quality trains are nice, thank you.
I know the fluid system has been tweaked a few times. I didn't have any problems with it in my playthrough.
One other thing... whenever I build my promethium ship I look for a circuit condition for distance traveled. It feels like it's something that should be there.
A theme with 2.1 was convenience. The quality of life additions have really added up, and SA feels like a refined and polished gaming system. Things like being able to use pumps on rail curves, although not needed, add a lot of options. The landing pad unloading bay is great. Being able to hide tall entities is very useful - I've used it a bunch. This current playthrough (I'm up to researching research productivity) was easily the smoothest. I noticed some other things as well while playing but I can't remember, except for one thing that I think is new in 2.1 which is the sound when you click on a ghost. I like that sound.
It always takes a while to fully integrate the new tools, but I'm pleasantly surprised at how big a difference seemingly small changes can make.
I don't play with enemies so I can't comment on that.
With the caveats that I still think quality needs another pass and the endgame is still lacking, SA feels finished now.
One more point is that a bug report I filed over a year ago was fixed (viewtopic.php?p=702077#p702077). I admit that the way this was handled initially was a sore spot for me, but upon noticing that it was fixed I went back to the report and saw that it had been addressed by Rseding91 soon after. I didn't notice at the time because he didn't reply to my comment so I didn't get a notification, and I used a workaround in game so I didn't encounter the original issue again. But thank you for listening.
EDIT: A couple more things. Sorry if I'm supposed to put this in the suggestions forum, but I thought I'd just collate everything here.
It would be nice to be able to see the combined energy usage of all entities in the energy usage graph.
EDIT EDIT: to clarify, it would be nice to see the overall power consumption on the same graph as the power consumers to get an idea of the ratio of power use. And also, it would be nice to be able to group together all selected entities to see their overall power usage. An example as to why this would be useful is on the promethium gathering ship, it would be nice to be able to group all the production and see the overall power usage when the weapons systems are removed. Same thing on a planet - if I've used a bunch of efficiency modules in assemblers, EM plants and foundries, it would be nice to see the overall effect on the entire group. This is a low priority suggestion ("it would be nice").
It would be nice to be able to define over what duration I see the graphs, especially the production graphs. The current options are not all useful, and there are other gradations that would be useful. For example, one hour is not long enough for some things, but 10 hours is way too long.
It would also be nice to be able to see a rolling average line, rather than just the true number, which is very often spikey and hard to read. Something like this:
- graph.png (32.5 KiB) Viewed 369 times
